Ask HN: What do you think about “dim-lighting” low score comments?
Long long time ago HN comments had visible scores. Then it was changed[1]. That was also a long time ago.
These days, all comments with positive scores display the same. Comments with negative scores, however, are “dim-lighted” with lighter (and lighter) gray font.
While In theory “dim-lighting” should make the comment less visible, it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.
What do you think? How is this effecting discussion? Any better UI ideas?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
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4 comments
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| on HN
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Reddit has pre-collapsed comments, which seem reasonable. But that will collapse the whole thread, which is undesirable.
> it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.
I'm more interested in the premise of this question.
(a) Is really this true, and backed up by HN-scraping of some sort?
(b) Do we want it to attract less attention? Sometimes they attract insightful replies explaining a common misconception.
In short: what problem are we trying to fix? Has this really reduced the quality of threads by much? By what metric and by how much?
Slightly OT: On mobile the up- and downvote arrows are too close together. For every vote I have to zoom in to accurately click the right one. I suggested to HN Support to place the downvote arrow to the right of the comment header, or have a separator/spacing between the 2 arrows.
I don't really have an issue with comment dimming. It shows that a significant number of users find the comment to be more noise than signal, so that those who wish to avoid such can do so easily.
I think I've seen some pre-collapsed threads here as well... specifically ones where an HN administrator has taken some sort of action and commented on that.
That is a nice solution, but does not work on mobile. Could be part of standard HN though (maybe configurable). I usually select the text, so it becomes readable.